Hot in the city (still)

Summer is definately in full swing this year. After last year’s vague attempt at hotness, which still felt pretty icky to my British inheritance, summer is back with a vengence now. The thermometer doohicky installed on my Firefox toolbar is showing me a lot of 30+ C temperatures, with the only upside being relatively little humidity – this is a good thing. The hot temperatures can be uncomfortable, but it’s that feeling of total dampness combined with rivers of sweat that bring true misery. Over the weekend I was up in Montreal again and the humidity was painful – 91%. You step out of the shower, dry yourself and are immediately wet again, all very strange. All of this hot dampness really made me appreciate the English weather when I was back the other week – of course England’s been suffering from its own heatwave this week, and they’re a lot less used to handling heat than New York!

Where you really want to be when it’s hot is Spain. They really know how to keep things cool. Siestas at the hottest part of the day – genius! Dark wood shutters outside of your window that still let the breeze in – marvellous! Sangria – si senor! I’m trying to apply some of this ecological sense to keep my own apartment cool, especially since I don’t yet have an a/c (plus I’m not convinced the electrics in my apartment will handle it at all well – when I turn the toaster on everything flickers). I have a box fan that gets moved into the window on the coolest of the two sides to the building, luckily being on the fourth floor there is more of a breeze to enjoy. Last night I made my own sun reflecting shades using tin foil and paper to try and cut down the window heat from my bakingly hot east facing wall. All of these tricks seem to be working well. So far. On the other hand there is something nice about a bit of cool, clean conditioned air…